Ninth Street Center Journal 5: Jurgen Schmitt and Tony Rostron

*JURGEN:*	Mainly my purpose right now is to make the thing with father and son polarity a little more real. What I did is I prepared some questions for myself that I can use as a guideline. I guess a good place to start is: in your opinion how does the world today generally see the relationship between father and son?
*PAUL:*	Well, they really have a tremendous unexpressed admiration for it. Sometimes it gets expressed -- I guess the word "unexpressed" isn't quite accurate -- but there's a tremendous backlog of feeling about it that doesn't quite get out in the open. But if you really want to fascinate people, you show a father/son relationship. They're really awe-struck by it.
*JURGEN:*	Have psychiatrists or psychologists delved into the types of relationships between fathers and son?
*PAUL:*	No, they haven't. The typical thing with psychiatrists is that they're just as afraid of the father/son relationship as they are of anything which has latent homosexuality in it. They would much prefer to follow Freud, who says the son is in competition with the father and wants to kill him and marry the mother. This is all very comforting. It makes it seem like everybody is totally heterosexual, and there is no problem then about love and power interchange between father and son. It ducks the whole issue.
*JURGEN:*	Exactly how does homosexuality come into that relationship?
*PAUL:*	Because of the polarity. The dynamic of the development starts very early. I don't know where -- somewhere between three and five years of age perhaps -- where the son, encouraged really by both the mother and father because they intuitively pick these things up from the civilization, but also out of his own needs, begins to differentiate his personality from his father's, because he specifically does not want to compete with the father. He doesn't want to identify with the father and try and be like the father because this does not leave him sufficient room for individuality and identity. It's much better for him if he can love the father if he's psychologically developing a feminine personality, or dominate the father if he's developing a psychologically masculine personality. Let's put it in terms of the father. If he sees that the father is really coming on to him with love, that this is a primary thing in the father, he'll respond with power. If the father is really coming on with a lot of power, the boy will respond with love. So he polarizes to the father. It's an easier way to deal with the father.
*JURGEN:*	I'm going to interrupt you for a minute. I think you just answered my next question: How does the polarity between father and son come into being?
*PAUL:*	Okay, it fuses with that. You know in very primitive cultures you can see that this polarity does not come about. And it cuts off the whole thing of inner identity, really, because all the men then tend to be masculine and all the women feminine, psychologically.
*JURGEN:*	Is that how that idea of following in your father's footsteps comes into being?
*PAUL:*	Well, the idea of following in your father's footsteps is either very literally true in primitive cultures -- in which the father, let's say, works with wood or with stone and the son does too, taking over all the father's patterns of dealing with the world -- or else it occurs in advanced cultures where people say "a chip off the old block" or "following in the father's footsteps". And all that means, then, when you get up to the point where you're dealing with highly developed civilizations, is that the son seems to be like the father because he talks with the same twang in his voice or the same voice profile qualities on a biological basis, or he has the same skin color or the same kind of hair maybe. They decide that the boy and the father are the same because, looking at them, they look alike and they sound alike without, again, going into the deeper aspects of character identity.
*JURGEN:*	What effect does that have on the potential relationship between father and son? I guess it would curtail it.
*PAUL:*	It simply means that this idea that people try to impose on fathers and sons that they should be real buddy-buddy together and should be going fishing and doing all the same things, is a bunch of bullshit -- that's what it really means. But insofar as they get into the creative side of life together, where the father really encourages the inner development of his son, where there's a real love/power interchange, where they are truly in love with each other -- you see? -- in a very creative kind of way, it makes for powerful relationships between fathers and sons. However, as you know, this doesn't happen in our culture too often.
*JURGEN:*	That leads me into another question then. At what point does this constructive interaction between father and son stop, and why does it stop?
*PAUL:*	Well, it certainly gets channelized into certain conventionally acceptable channels in childhood. And then when the boy comes into adolescence, it's stopped by the actual emergence of potential or real homosexual feelings. I've had patients report to me that they actually wanted to "make" their fathers, they actually felt sexual towards their fathers. Or they saw the father was troubled by holding on to the old intimacy, if they had an intimacy, and they had to cut it out. It's just too disturbing.
*JURGEN:*	Why does the son polarize with the character of the father and not the mother?
*PAUL:*	Because in the case of the father there is the ability to sense that they are both reaching out into the world in a creative way together as you find in a community of men. Now of course if women were equally creative with men in the civilized world, the question might come up, couldn't the boy polarize with either one? But since there is a tendency for the cultural identification of the male with the male, I think it is easier for males to differentiate their characters because otherwise the identification becomes too automatic or too strong or too much on a simply elemental social and biological basis. If the boy is like his father he tends to be wiped out by all the father's qualities. It's just overwhelming.
*JURGEN:*	How does the father utilize this relationship?
*PAUL:*	He utilizes it as a source of reaching in himself. If you go to any obstetrical waiting room and see how men react when they're told "You have a son", I mean it's like their dearest dream came true. It's like there's something shining in their eyes that you may not see before or after, because it really does not get fulfilled in the relationship with the baby and the developing boy. But this is something that reaches very deep into the heartstrings and the soul of human beings, of men. They really have this great sense of what they are going to mean to their son and what their son is going to mean to them.
*TONY:*	Where does that come from?
*PAUL:*	It's a residue of the cultural emphasis on creativity. We live in a civilization which has polarity. We have masculine men and we have feminine men, and this creates a potential world of great reaching, of great creativity, of great self-validation, where the workmanship of love and the commitments of power are everywhere being sought and everywhere needed for self-development. They have a particularly well-focused ground for being worked out in a father/son relationship.
*JURGEN:*	What role does the inner identity of the mother play in terms of identifying with the son?
*PAUL:*	A great role. That's where the son gets his identity, because as the mother and father are polarized together, insofar as the son now begins to takes on, let's say, a psychologically feminine relationship to a masculine father, he finds a feminine mother to identify with. So it's quite easy for him to do. And vice versa, if he has a psychologically masculine mother, as in your case, he identifies with that. But again, you see, this is good for him because it doesn't bring him into conflict with the mother as much as it would if he were identifying with his father, because they have some differences due to their gender differences and certainly due to their socially defined differences. So he's really not competing when he identifies with the mother nearly as much as he would if he identified with the father. They do different kinds of things. Again, I'm not going to commit myself to what that might be like 500 years from now when women are much more like men, much more creative, when there are much less socially established differences. But I think that the whole history of civilization has clearly shown that men enjoy their polarization together, and there's no reason why they should give it up.
*JURGEN:*	Can you think of any examples that I might follow up on like in literature or in poetry?
*PAUL:*	All over the place. Everywhere you look.
*TONY:*	Can you think of anything specific?
*PAUL:*	Well I just can't think of anything it isn't touched by it.
*TONY:*	A good example of a father and son relationship is in Dalton Trumble's book, "Johnny Got His Gun".
*JURGEN:*	I'd be very interested in making a list of things just so I can explore it a little bit further, so if anybody comes up with anything, jot it down or something.
*PAUL:*	Well, you know it would take quite a bit of research to dig these things out. If you want the names of authors who tend to emphasize the relationship of man to man especially in a polarized way, then you think of someone like Joseph Conrad, who wrote maybe twenty novels, or twenty books of novel length -- some of them have short stories in them. Practically all of them deal with this theme in one form or another. Then we have the modern French writers. We have Flaubert, who had a strong sense of the latent homosexuality in the human scene. But then, you know, all great writers have this sense, and they put it in it. Well, you know, you and I discussed "The Old Man and the Sea". I really was unaware of how much Ernest really put the father/son polarity into "The Old Man and the Sea" until I saw it the other night. And as I say, it really got to me because Ernest's father killed himself just as Ernest did -- shot his head off. And I was there. I wasn't in the room at the time, but the younger son Lester -- "Gaspipe" we called him -- was home sick with the flu that day and he heard the shot in the next room. It was very hard on all of us.
*JURGEN:*	There's something that comes up quite a lot: younger homosexual men who seek out older homosexual men. A lot of people say "Oh, he's got a father complex."
*PAUL:*	I reject all that immediately because any time one man gets attached to another man in a polarized way they are reliving the father/son polarity. It doesn't make any difference which one's the older, which one's the younger. You take Dean and me; Dean's in his twenties and I'm in my sixties. Dean is just as much my father to me as I am his father to him, because we understand this polarity and we exploit it, in our minds and in our relationship. I never allow it to come about that I look on myself as the father because I'm older. I look on myself as the father to him insofar as there's an exchange of father functions, and he's also the repository of impulses which in me originally began to be expressed toward my father.
*JURGEN:*	So in other words, a polarized relationship between two men or two women or whatever is an extension of the same concept.
*PAUL:*	Absolutely. The relationship between you and Tony should be regarded in the same way, and if you find yourself in advance of Tony in certain areas, it doesn't mean you're being more fatherly. If you want a word for that, let's say you're more parental at that moment, he's more like a child. You can find words to use in a situation where you're really for the moment assuming the leadership role and he's just following you for the moment, you see? If you want to call that parental, all right, but I never use the word father/son for it because I want to save that for the real polarity. And so any time he's your son, fine. You're also his son.
*JURGEN:*	I think I've run out of questions.
*PAUL:*	I don't think it's too hard to understand why fathers and sons polarize: because they get a big kick out of it, you know? There's a great latent homosexual longing in men in our culture. Boys learn to feel it very, very early. And as soon as they can get a polarization, why they get a kick, you know? I can just feel it. I don't remember clearly when it started in me, but. . . . You see, I had a fraternal relationship very, very early because I'm a twin. I shared the womb with another person. My brother and I were very intimate from a very early age. We even had a private language together. Now, that's not a polarized relationship -- between brothers. And I can sense how it would be to begin to idealize my father as more and more I developed the sensitive side of my personality, how much more exciting it would be for me to idealize him than to try to treat him like another brother. It just has more impact, it has more excitement. It speaks a more gut language.
*JURGEN:*	In a very conventional sense, the image of father and son -- especially when the son is in adolescence, when he starts becoming what they consider a man and all that -- the relationship between the father and the son gets very cut and dry.
*PAUL:*	Well, this has to do with the generation gap partly. It has to do with the degree to which they can handle or not handle the homosexual parts of their personalities. I thought it was very interesting to watch it in the TV show "An American Family", because this very conventional father actually has a great homosexual attachment to his homosexual son whom he knows is homosexual, namely Lance. He's very kindly toward him, very appreciative in directions often that are rather unrealistic even. And of course he does discipline him; he does say, "Oh you're spending too much money." He comes on with some very conventional attitudes, but basically he just loves to idealize him, he loves to tell his friends that he's got this interesting boy that's in Paris or wherever he was at the particular time, and there's a great glow about the whole thing. So I was very aware of the father's idealization of Lance.
*JURGEN:*	How does the mother react to that?
*PAUL:*	Well, it's one way for the father to express the idealization which he also would have liked to feel and has felt in the past toward Pat, his wife. But it doesn't work with Pat anymore. Pat hasn't done a god-damn thing with her life except stay home and take care of the kids. And here's this glamorous kid, faggoty though he be, running around out in the world trying to do something important with his life. Now, he's failing, yes, but he's exciting and I'm sure Bill really, really feels it right down into his balls -- and that's the point of this whole thing.
*JURGEN:*	Just one other thing. I'm not too familiar with that thing that Freud came up with, the Oedipus complex and all. Could you explain that to me? How do you see that?
*PAUL:*	Well, he saw the primary conflict of the growing boy as a castration anxiety conflict. He was a feminine himself and he didn't know how to handle the sense of impotence he felt about himself. He was supposed to be a really dominant male coming on with a big cock and laying a fuck into women. We have good evidence that he never had sex with his wife after he was forty years of age. And it just didn't work. So he developed this whole theory of the castration anxiety: that he was driven by guilt about his conflicts with his father, this kind of thing. And he felt that this was the standard problem of our civilization, that boys were intimidated by their fathers and felt very competitive and thought as punishment they would have their cocks cut off. Anyhow, he related it to the story of Oedipus, which is a Greek play, in which Oedipus returns to his original home and does not recognize his mother, doesn't know it's his mother. He meets his father on a road somewhere and they get into a quarrel and he kills his father without knowing it's his father. And then he goes back and marries his mother, and I think at first he doesn't even know it's his mother. Something like that. So the Greeks felt it was fate that was doing this. So Freud took it over and made it the standard pattern of human development.
*JURGEN:*	How do you see it?
*PAUL:*	Well I think it was just a story of what happened, that was tragic. It didn't lead to his development at all. Any man who kills his father and marries his mother isn't going anywhere in life! [laughter] The same theme was arrived at in Visconti's "The Damned". This guy ended up fucking his mother and it was a complete disaster. It didn't lead anywhere for him. It didn't validate him in any way, and led the mother, far from being like a groovy experience that helped her get more into life or something, destroyed her also. She went into a depression and decline afterwards. The whole thing was a complete tragedy. So much for the god-damn Oedipus complex. If it's so real, why don't we get some satisfaction out of fucking our mothers occasionally, you know? Some sense of self-validation, some sense of "Well, this is my natural human destiny"?

	See a 1974 interview with Jurgen about counseling
	See a 1974 interview with Tony about counseling
	See a 1990 interview with Tony about Paul Rosenfels